Beyond the Lines: An Autobiography

by Kuldip Nayar

  After sending the flash on Shastri’s death, I went back to his assistants’ room to learn the details about his death. Bits and pieces of information gathered together indicated that Shastri, after attending the farewell reception, reached his dacha around 10 p.m. Jagan Nath, with Shastri’s servant Ram Nath and some other assistants, trooped into his room. They had heard about Ayub’s invitation to tea in Islamabad. Loyal and devoted as they were, they said that he should not overfly Pakistan because Pakistanis might engage in mischief.

  Jagan Nath recalled how Gujarat Chief Minister Balwant Rai Mehta was killed during the India-Pakistan conflict when ‘a Pakistani plane had downed his Dakota’. (Forty-six years later Qais Hussain, a distinguished Pakistani pilot, wrote to the daughter of the IAF pilot who was flying Mehta, admitting that he mistook the plane for a Beechcraft.)

  Shastri dismissed Jagan Nath’s apprehension: ‘Now we have an agreement. Moreover, Ayub is a good person.’ Shastri told Ram Nath to bring him his food which came from Ambassador Kaul’s house, prepared by his cook, Jan Mohammed. He ate very little: a dish of spinach and potatoes and a curry. While he was eating a call came from Delhi, which Jagan Nath took. It was from Venkataraman, another of Shastri’s personal assistants. He said that the reaction in Delhi to the Tashkent Declaration was favourable but Babuji’s (as he was called by the family and the staff) own household was not happy. Surendra Nath Dwivedi, the Praja Socialist Party leader and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the Jana Sangh leader, had also criticized the withdrawal of Indian forces from Hajipir and Tithwal. Shastri said that the Opposition was bound to criticize the declaration.

  Jagan Nath asked Shastri if he should connect him to his residence as he had not spoken to his family for two days. Shastri first said ‘No’, but then changed his mind. This was around 11 p.m. (Tashkent time, half an hour ahead of New Delhi). First, his son-in-law, V.N. Singh, spoke, but he did not say much. Then Kusum, Shastri’s eldest and favourite daughter, took the phone from her brother-in-law. Shastri asked her: ‘Tum ko kaisa laga? [How did you react to it?]’ She replied: ‘Babuji, hamein achha nahin laga. [I did not like it]’. He asked about Amma, the word by which Lalita Shastri was referred to in the house. ‘She too did not like it’, was Kusum’s reply. Shastri observed: ‘Agar gharwalon ko achha nahin laga, to bahar wale kya kahengae? [If people in the family did not like it, what will outsiders say?]’.

  Shastri asked his daughter to hand the telephone to Amma. Despite Shastri’s many requests, Lalita Shastri did not come on the phone. He then asked for the morning newspapers to be sent to Kabul, where an Indian air force plane was reaching the next day to collect him.

  The telephone call, according to Jagan Nath, appeared to have upset Shastri. The Indian press too had been rough on him. He began pacing up and down in his room. This was not unusual as Shastri would often do that when talking to people who came to meet him at his residence in Delhi. For one who had suffered two heart attacks earlier, the telephone conversation, the journalists’ attitude, and the walk must have been a strain.

  Ram Nath gave Shastri milk which he used to drink before retiring at night. The prime minister once again began pacing up and down and later asked for water, which Ram Nath gave from the thermos flask on the dressing table. (He told me that he had closed the flask.) It was a little before midnight when Shastri told Ram Nath to retire to his room and get some sleep because he had to get up early to leave for Kabul. Ram Nath offered to sleep on the floor in Shastri’s room but Shastri told him to go to his own room upstairs.

  The assistants were packing the luggage at 1.20 a.m. (Tashkent time), Jagan Nath recalled, when they suddenly saw Shastri at the door. With great difficulty Shastri asked: ‘Where is doctor sahib?’ It was in the sitting room that a racking cough convulsed Shastri, and his personal assistants helped him to bed. Jagan Nath gave him water and remarked: ‘Babuji, now you will be all right.’ Shastri only touched his chest and then became unconscious. (When Lalita Shastri was told by Jagan Nath in Delhi that he had given him water she said: ‘You are a very lucky person because you gave him his last cup of water.’)

  Dr Chugh, his physician, who had arrived by then, felt Shastri’s pulse and tearfully said: ‘Babuji, you did not give me time.’ He then gave him an injection in the arm and later put the syringe straight into the heart. Finding no response, he attempted reanimation through artificial mouth-to-mouth respiration. Dr Chugh asked Jagan Nath to call for additional medical help. The Soviet government had posted a security guard who, after hearing the word ‘doctor’, ran to call them. A lady doctor arrived ten minutes later, followed by more physicians. They found Shastri dead. The official time of death was declared as 1.32 a.m. (Tashkent time); in India it was just after 2 a.m. on 11 January 1966.

  Gen. Ayub was genuinely grieved by Shastri’s death. He came to Shastri’s dacha at 4 a.m. and said, looking towards me: ‘Here is a man of peace who gave his life for amity between India and Pakistan.’ Later, Ayub told the Pakistani journalists that Shastri was one person with whom he had hit it off well; Pakistan and India might have solved their differences had he lived,’ he said.

  Aziz Ahmad, Pakistan’s foreign secretary rang up Bhutto to inform him about Shastri’s death. Bhutto was half asleep and heard only the word, ‘died’, and apparently asked, ‘Which of the two bastards?’

  When I returned from Tashkent, Lalita Shastri asked me why Shastri’s body had turned blue. I replied: ‘I am told that when bodies are embalmed, they turn blue.’ She then inquired about ‘certain cuts’ on Shastri’s body. I did not know about those because I had not seen the body. Even so, her remark that no postmortem had been conducted either at Tashkent or Delhi startled me. It was indeed unusual.

  Apparently, she and others in the family suspected foul play. A few days later I heard that Lalita Shastri was angry with the two personal assistants, who had accompanied Shastri, because they had refused to sign a statement which alleged that Shastri did not die a natural death.

  Kamaraj rang me up not to discuss Shastri’s death but to find out whether the family had the resources to sustain itself. I told him that as far as I knew they had nothing to fall back upon. He had a legislation passed to provide free accommodation and an allowance to the wife of the deceased prime minister.

  As days passed, the Shastri family became increasingly convinced that he had been poisoned. In 1970, on 2 October (Shastri’s birthday), Lalita Shastri asked for a probe into her husband’s death. The family seemed to be upset that Jan Mohammed, T.N. Kaul’s cook at the time, had cooked the food, not Ram Nath his personal servant. This was strange as the same Jan Mohammed had prepared food for Shastri when he visited Moscow in 1965.

  Following newspaper reports, the old guard Congress party supported the demand for a probe into Shastri’s death. I asked Morarji Desai towards the end of October 1970 whether he really believed that Shastri did not die a natural death. Desai said: ‘That is all politics. I am sure there was no foul play. He died of a heart attack. I have checked with the doctor and his secretary, C.P. Srivastava, who accompanied him to Tashkent.’

  The news of Shastri’s death had spread throughout Tashkent. It was one of those gloomy sunless days such as that which Balzac describes as ‘a beautiful blind woman’. People had lined both sides of the road leading to the airport. Only a few days earlier they had cheered as they welcomed him and today they wept for him. The overwhelming silence that enveloped the route was broken only by muffled drums as the funeral procession, with Ayub Khan as one of the pall-bearers, inched through the streets of Tashkent. Friendly hands stretched towards us journalists as we wended our way along the road to catch a special plane. I could imagine thousands of my countrymen waiting in Delhi to receive the body and have a darshan of the man who in 19 months had left a mark which was not only deep but earthy.

  To some he might appear as a small man figuratively as he was physically, without a guiding philosophy or vision, to the leftists he might be a man ‘without conviction’, and to man
y others his tenure might have been only a ‘parenthesis in Indian history’, as TTK put it. Even so, as Shastri would himself say: ‘Nobody can succeed Nehru. We can only try to carry on his work in a humble way.’ It was during his tenure that the Indian army, which had been humiliated at the hands of China in 1962, regained its self-confidence and rekindled national pride. Pragmatism took precedence over ideology, corruption charges against persons in high places were pursued to their logical conclusion. The Punjab chief minister, Pratap Singh Kairon, had to resign after a Supreme Court judge held him guilty, Orissa Chief Minister Biren Mitra and former Chief Minister Biju Patnaik had to face prosecution on the basis of a report by another Supreme Court judge, H.R. Khanna. Finance Minister TTK had to resign because he did not want the chief justice of India to examine the chargesheet against him.

  TTK was still in the cabinet when Shastri assigned to me the task of finding out from Shanti Prasad Jain whether he would be willing to sell Bennett Coleman, which published the Times of India, Nav Bharat, and other publications. They were being run by a board that the government had appointed when TTK told Nehru that the owners had been found indulging in malpractices.

  Shanti Prasad and his talented wife, Rama Jain, were known to me as we played bridge together. Shanti Prasad had told me to start a Hindi UNI service which he promised to subsidize. I was embarrassed to have to carry Shastri’s message to him. He was upset. He told me that even if he had to sell all his businesses, including the house in which he was living, he would never sell the Times of India. Shastri returned Bennett Coleman to him.

  For sixteen of the nineteen months of his tenure Shastri remained vulnerable to the pressures and pulls within and outside the Congress party. It was a pity that he died just when he had acquired the stature to withstand the pressure. The ordinary man was beginning to feel that India’s prime minister could be a common man, one of them.

  I never suspected any foul play at Tashkent till many years later, when during Indira Gandhi’s rule, an independent MP, Dharamyash Dev, alleged in the Lok Sabha that Shastri had been poisoned. The charge shook the nation and the government was in the dock. T.N. Kaul was then the foreign secretary. He was attacked for having been ‘party’ to the conspiracy. It was a ridiculous charge that he wanted the pro-Soviet Indira Gandhi to come to power and had poisoned Shastri’s food, which had come from his house.

  As there had been no postmortem of Shastri’s body, the allegation of poisoning gained currency. Without any authentic rebuttal, Kaul called me at the Statesman to request me to issue a statement that Shastri’s death was due to a heart failure. He pressed me when I told him that I did not want to get mixed up with the debate in parliament.

  From that day, particularly because of Kaul’s repeated requests, I have wondered whether Shastri really did die of heart failure. I tried to pursue the matter when I was India’s high commissioner in the UK. The collapse of the Soviet Union had resulted in many things, one of them the opening of its archives. A busybody from Moscow known to the high commission met me to ask for his annual air ticket to Delhi and back. I took the opportunity to request him to find out whether the papers relating to Tashkent had been released. He said he had already gone through the papers relating the Tashkent meeting and had not found anything on Shastri’s death. Were the relevant papers destroyed or withheld? He did not know. The mystery deepened because the Ministry of External Affairs refused access to papers relating to Shastri’s death. The ministry also rejected in 2009 the information sought through the Right to Information Act ‘in public interest’.

  8

  Indira Gandhi as Prime Minister

  Succession, Foreign Affairs, Clash with and Victory over the Syndicate, Garibi Hatao and Constitutional Amendments

  Lal Bahadur Shastri’s death caught us all unaware. The nation was initially in a state of shock and then of stupor, unable to realize the full implications of yet another succession at the centre. I recalled Shastri’s prophecy that if he were to die within one or two years, Indira Gandhi would become the prime minister.

  Once again the responsibility for selecting the prime minister fell on the shoulders of Congress President K. Kamaraj, who flew to Delhi for the purpose in a chartered plane. R. Venkatraman, his interpreter since the days he was chief minister of Madras state, accompanied him. He told me that Kamaraj went to sleep as soon as the plane took off, but awoke fifteen minutes before landing and said that Indira Gandhi would become prime minister, as if he had already pondered over the question in his sleep.

  When I asked Kamaraj several months later how he had arrived at the decision, he said, ‘The choice was really between Indira Gandhi and Gulzarilal Nanda. My colleagues, particularly N. Nijalingappa, then Mysore’s chief minister, and S.K. Patil from Bombay were in favour of Nanda. I, however, thought he was a confused person and would ruin the country so I selected Mrs Gandhi.’ Kamaraj added: ‘All warned me against the choice. Krishna Menon also told me not to trust her, but I thought she was better than Nanda.’

  Kamaraj presumed there would be collective leadership. ‘To me she appeared to be the right choice,’ he said, admitting later that he was proved wrong. She wanted all power for herself; and collective leadership was something she totally opposed. She made it a point to establish the prime minister’s pre-eminence, and for that reason was immediately in conflict with the old guard.

  There was strong opposition to her, particularly among senior party bosses. Some even called her ‘incompetent’. Her record as minister for information and broadcasting was considered to have been at best ‘mediocre’. There were many who had been slighted by her during Nehru’s days in power. N. Sanjiva Reddy, a minister in Shastri’s cabinet, recalled how she had treated him ‘like a doormat’ when he was Congress president.

  The old guard, the syndicate, thought it would be better if one of them were in office. Why not Kamaraj? He was aware of his limitations. He told me in broken English: ‘An Indian prime minister should know both Hindi and English. I know neither.’ However, M. Bhaktavatsalam, his successor as chief minister, offered me another explanation: ‘What deterred Kamaraj was the possibility of a contest in which he knew he could not defeat Morarji, a north Indian, while Mrs Gandhi from Uttar Pradesh could.’

  For the first time in the history of the Congress parliamentary party, there was a contest for leadership. Indira Gandhi secured 355 votes and Morarji Desai 165, less than half. There was no doubt about Indira Gandhi’s popular support. For most people, it marked the continuation of the Nehru legend, briefly interrupted by Shastri. They missed Nehru but consoled themselves with the thought that their hero’s daughter, Nehru’s bitiya (daughter) was at the helm of affairs.

  The reaction of political parties was on predictable lines. The rightists suspected her of harbouring communist leanings. Both the Jana Sangh and the Swatantra Party which C. Rajagopalachari had founded to espouse a rightist ideology, openly said that she was pro-Soviet. To the leftists, she was more acceptable than Morarji, although they had scores to settle with her. As the Congress president she had forced Nehru to dismiss the communist government in Kerala even though it had a majority in the legislature. E.M.S. Namboodiripad, the then chief minister, who went all the way to Shimla to seek Nehru’s intervention, told me on his return that he found him ‘unhappy and helpless’.

  Like Shastri, her first policy statement was vaguely worded, with a pledge of secularism, democracy, and socialism. She rejected the demand of persons like Krishna Menon that ‘Either we become a socialist society or we become a capitalist society; there is no other way.’ She said she would follow the path shown by Mahatma Gandhi, her father, and Shastri.’ It was a measure of Shastri’s popularity after the 1965 war that forced her to mention his name. She had been critical of him throughout his years in office.

  Indira Gandhi’s first decision as prime minister in 1966 was how to deal with Lalita Shastri’s insistence on having the words Jai Jawan Jai Kisan engraved on Shastri’s samadhi. This was the
popular slogan that he had coined during the 1965 war. Left to Indira Gandhi, Shastri would have been cremated at Allahabad, his home town. She suggested this to Kamaraj who did not agree. Indira Gandhi’s opposition to his cremation in Delhi caused Lalita Shastri to threaten a fast unto death. Indira Gandhi relented, and Shastri’s samadhi was built in the Rajghat area with the slogan engraved on it.

  Despite her assurance that she would usher in a socialist pattern of society, she chose the US, a capitalist country, for her maiden foreign trip as prime minister. To placate critics, she included at the last minute a short stay in Paris to meet General Charles de Gaulle before reaching Washington, and stopped at London and Moscow on her return journey. (Whitehall noted that it was for the first time an Indian prime minister making a maiden trip abroad without first stopping at London.)

  Once she agreed to devalue the rupee, she found all doors in Washington open. President Lydon Johnson said he was her guardian. He made an unusual gesture by staying back for dinner at the Indian embassy in Washington after his talks with Indira Gandhi.

  Whatever the Soviet Union might have thought of her visit, it was not popular with the Indian communists. Though they had not opposed her till then, they now jibed at her and said that Johnson had ‘ordered her’ to come. The Congress party, not yet under her thumb, also resented ‘American dictation’. Kamaraj told me that had India stood firm and not yielded on the devaluation of the rupee, ‘We would have developed much needed self-reliance’.

  Indira Gandhi had to give the Congress an assurance of sorts, and it was strangely worded: ‘We can and shall do without it [US assistance] and in any case we will not debase ourselves to get it.’

  Indira Gandhi defended devaluation on the ground that Shastri had agreed to it in principle and had accepted a package of aid and a loan from the World Bank. Asoka Mehta, a socialist who joined her cabinet, told me that it was Shastri who had conveyed his willingness to devalue the rupee. I did not find any evidence to support this contention of Indira Gandhi or Mehta. I think they were looking for a scapegoat when devaluation did not work.